My Experience with Refine.dev: A Journey to a Better Admin Dashboard

Introduction

Creating an efficient admin dashboard is crucial for managing data and operations smoothly. After some extensive research, our team came across Refine.dev, a headless component library built for React and Next.js. This post details our journey, challenges, and success with Refine.dev.

Discovering Refine.dev

We needed a solution that was:

Compatible with Next.js (preferably based on React)
Highly customizable and flexible (a must)
Low-code or no-code tool (preferably)

Refine.dev checked all these boxes. It offers headless components that abstract complex functionalities, making it easier to build robust applications.

What is Refine.dev?

Refine.dev is an open-source React framework designed to speed up the development of internal tools, admin panels, dashboards, and other data-intensive applications. It provides a set of headless components and hooks, which means you have full control over the design and can integrate it with any UI library, like Ant Design, Material UI, or others. Refine.dev simplifies the development process by offering built-in solutions for data fetching, state management, authentication, and more, allowing developers to focus on building features that matter.

Our Initial Approach

First Attempt: Next.js with Page Router and Material UI

Our first implementation used Next.js with Page Router and Material UI. We also tried integrating NextAuth and Auth0 to handle authentication and authorization. Unfortunately, this setup didn't meet our expectations. The integration felt clunky, and customizing components was more challenging than anticipated. Additionally, integrating NextAuth with Auth0 resulted in a double layer of JWT tokens, causing issues with refresh token requests and login flows. This setup led to incomplete integration, and we had to reconsider our approach.

Second Attempt: Next.js with AppRouter and Ant Design

A month later, armed with updates from Refine.dev, we tried a new approach:

Next.js with AppRouter
Ant Design (AntD) instead of Material UI
Used only NextAuth with its NextAuth-Auth0 package

This combination proved to be highly effective. The integration was seamless, and the customizability of AntD aligned perfectly with our requirements. However, we still encountered the double JWT token issue, but we decided to proceed with this setup as it was suggested by the tools we were using and worked well enough for our needs.

Key Benefits of Refine.dev

Flexibility and Customization

Refine.dev’s headless nature allows for extensive customization. This flexibility was crucial for our project, which required a high degree of personalization in both design and functionality.

Concept of Providers

Refine.dev introduces the concept of providers, which include:

Resource Provider: Manages all resources of your admin dashboard. A resource is a set of pages or sub-pages grouped together, such as settings with various subsections like profile settings and user settings.
Access Provider: Controls user access to specific resources. This abstraction helps manage permissions effectively.
Data Provider: Defines API calls for handling CRUD operations like get, list, create, update, and delete. These providers support pagination, filtering, sorting, and ordering. Refine.dev offers predefined data providers for REST APIs and GraphQL, which are highly customizable.

CRUD Operations

Our use case involved heavy CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. Refine.dev excels in this area, providing robust tools to handle large datasets efficiently.

Integration with Role-Based Access Management

We integrated our own role-based access management system with Refine.dev, alongside NextAuth and Auth0 for authentication and authorization. This setup ensured secure and efficient access control across our application.

Conclusion

Refine.dev has proven to be an excellent choice for building our admin dashboard. Its flexibility, customizability, and robust support for CRUD operations have made development smoother and more efficient. Despite some challenges with authentication integration, the overall experience has been positive. If your project involves similar requirements, I highly recommend giving Refine.dev a try.